


7/27

by just_about_nothing



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ants, F/M, Family, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Post-Break Up, Self Confidence Issues, Shopping, Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-19 05:00:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15502860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_about_nothing/pseuds/just_about_nothing
Summary: (note added 1/16/2019. originally posted 7/31/2018.) the young man in this killed himself about three months after this was published. i hadn't seen him since before we broke up and i wasn't totally over him. i don't believe it was my fault; he was suicidal when we were together and it was a constant worry for me. The summer ended and winter started and i feel i'll never be warm again.





	7/27

The Friday my first boyfriend broke up with me was also the start of the plague of flying ants and seemed to be the end of monsoon season. I say it was a Friday and it was, if you count 1:30 in the morning on Friday as Friday. It is, technically, but no one really thinks of it as. Just like you can still be in a relationship after not seeing each other for five weeks and only texting goodnight back and forth each night. Technically. 

The flying ants were really more problematic as a whole than my boyfriend. I hate ants and I don't hate him but nonetheless, the ants seemed like the least of my problems. I was okay with the boy who broke my heart sneaking his hands down or up into my shirt. I was less okay when ants did it. That didn't stop me from not caring about the ants at all. 

Like I said, it was the end of monsoon season and so the rains were still coming almost every night. The first night of the ants (Friday), it rained hard and we found dead ants in the puddle that formed in our carport. There were a lot of them. They edged the puddle in a solid line. And yet there were more and more that kept coming. There weren't quite enough to form a solid rug of ants like you can see when you put a pile of sugar down on the ground and the little tiny black ants come and swarm but it was a close thing. Everywhere you stepped there were ants.

This was at the end of July and I like to go barefoot outside in the summer, nevermind about the concrete burning my feet. It was a trick to avoid stepping on the ants. I manged. Perhaps the weeks of tiptoeing around how mad I was at not being able to get a response about anything serious (like when I could see him next) payed off after all. Stepping on ants isn't great-- they squish and I don't like sticky things. That being said, I didn't mind getting precome on my hands (I was never able to make him come, and despite what I know, it made me feel inadequate). 

The problem with flying ants is that they can fly. This means that if you're trying to get them from sneaking into your house, you can't just watch the space where the door doesn't quite meet the floor, you also have to watch the space between other cracks as well. I don't know if there were ants coming through the hole in the ceiling where the water came through and soaked my sewing machine and my father's cords and little robot but I wouldn't put it past them. They were right bastards. 

The ants were still there Saturday. However, they were dying, at the least. Vinegar had been put out and they died in droves. This made myself and the car and my father smell like vinegar.

I don't know how that Sunday went as I left the house. Well, I slept in until noon, after staying up til four that morning and went out at two. Same thing really. The flying ants seemed to be dying in droves, in the vinegar my father set out and in the standing water that was left from the last rain. My father's girlfriend and I went out shopping-- she called it retail therapy, I didn't care-- and she, who lived in the hipster district, took me out to the same shopping complex that my ex lived near. I don't know how often he went there but the last time I saw him that's where we were going to go. We missed the bus that was going to get us there. We were sat outside a car dealership and I subtly pissed on the ground. As the bus sped by us I laughed and he looked at me, angry. It was unusual behavior for him who made jokes about cutting while bearing such scars on his chest. 

I shopped in fear of seeing him. It did not rain that day. The stores were filled with plaid and houndstooth and they made me think of him. I did not cry in the shopping center, despite that being all I'd done that weekend so far. Of that I am proud. 

That night, I ate dinner at my father's girlfriend's and there were no flying ants there. Of that I was pleased. When my father looked at me and told me to wait in the car, I went outside but I laid on the sidewalk and looked up at the stars. Despite it not raining, it was cloudy and that part of town had a lot of light pollution. I sobbed while looking up at the stars. I laid like that until a pain pierced me where my leg met my pelvis. That's when I got up and looked through the window at the happy couple, laughing together. 

There were more ants dead than alive Monday. I filled up my neighbor's watering pot and watered her plants with the mud colored water that came out of it. I would have felt bad about it but I watered them with dead flying ants the last time I did so. I did not cry Monday. I told my therapist about my ex and she worried that I cut myself. I was not cutting myself. I was sleeping too much and eating too little. It was a hot July but once monsoon season came, it cooled down. The heat was not a valid excuse. That night, it hailed and rained and my knee ached. 

Tuesday, I went to work, wearing one of the new skirts I bought. Wednesday was the same. Thursday, new music came in the mail and I listened to it, grateful that I did not share this band with my former lover. 

Friday it had been a week and I still missed him. If it took about a year to get through every ten years you were together and we were together for 1/6 of a year, I should be about over him by now. I thought about calling and asking, finally, why he'd wanted to break up with me. 

The ants were gone and so was my summer and my lover.

**Author's Note:**

> (note added 1/16/2019. originally posted 7/31/2018.) the young man in this killed himself about three months after this was published. i hadn't seen him since before we broke up and i wasn't totally over him. i don't believe it was my fault; he was suicidal when we were together and it was a constant worry for me. The summer ended and winter started and i feel i'll never be warm again.


End file.
